Science & Invention

Morton was a keen astronomer and built his own observatory, in 1818, in the town of Kilmarnock; a seventy foot high square tower, in what became known as Morton Place. The tower was demolished in 1957. Andrew Barclay, the locomotive builder, was a rival of Mortons in astronomy and this rivalry extended into business.

Morton also made Dumfries’s Camera Obscura, for the Dumfries and Maxwelltown Astronomical Society, as an instrument for observing sun-spots. It was installed on the 28th July 1836, and is the oldest and last, of the ‘astronomical’ obscuras still working in Britain, the others, like that in Edinburgh, are merely used to view the surrounding scenery. Morton had been elected, one year earlier, an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts – no mean feat for the son of an Ayrshire bricklayer. He died in 1862.